Keynotes

“When we began the conference 13 years ago, we all walked away inspired by a shared passion for Agile development that reaches across borders, languages, and industries. Every year the conference continues to inspire and invoke serious advancements in our field, and this year’s conference keynote lineup reflects the progress we’ve made as a community. Agile thinking has permeated the development culture all the way up to the highest levels of government oversight.”

~ Mitch Lacey, AGILE2014 Chair

Each year we welcome thought leaders, innovators, and achievers as they share their unique experiences and insights through compelling Keynote addresses. We invite you to learn more about these extraordinary individuals.

Sam Guckenheimer is the author of three books on Agile Practices, DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management, most recently Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012: Adopting Agile Software Practices: From Backlog to Continuous Feedback. By day, Sam is the Product Owner for the Microsoft Visual Studio product line, consisting of the IDE, the SaaS offering Visual Studio Online, and Team Foundation Server. In this capacity, he acts as the chief customer advocate, responsible for strategy of the next releases of these products. He has 30 years’ experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry worldwide. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Sam was Director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation, now the Rational Division of IBM. He holds five patents on software lifecycle tools. A frequent speaker at software industry conferences, Sam is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University. Sam lives in the Seattle area with his wife and three children in a sustainable house they built that has been described in articles in Metropolitan Home and Pacific Northwest magazine.

KEYNOTE TITLE: Journey to Cloud CadenceABSTRACT: Sam describes a ten-year transformation at Microsoft Developer Division from a waterfallian box product delivery cycle of four years to Agile practices enabling a hybrid SaaS and on-prem business, with a single code base, triweekly delivery of new features in the service, and quarterly delivery for on-premise customers. He presents three waves of improvement and learning: first, the reduction of technical debt and other waste to gain trustworthy transparency, second, the increase in the flow of customer value, and third the shortening of cycle time to allow continuous feedback and continuous business improvement.

The current scale of the business is that there are millions of customer accounts each on–premise and in the cloud. This hybrid situation will exist for many years, and is a necessary part of the business.

Sam will discuss both the organizational issues of transformation and give examples from monthly service reviews of key practices and metrics, such as hypothesis-driven development, funnel analysis, performance monitoring, MTTD and MTTR improvement, log analysis, root cause remediation, scale unit replication and canarying, common code base, testing cycles, georeplication, feature flags, compatibility and compliance testing. He will share his thoughts on the lessons learned in moving from a traditional software delivery team to a modern DevOps team.

DIANA LARSEN

Deeply in tune with how work teams adapt, develop, and contribute, Diana Larsen works with organizations around the world to design high performance work systems, improve project team effectiveness, and support leaders and enterprises in their transitions to Agile methods.

Diana co-founded FutureWorks Consulting and is considered an authority in the areas of Agile software development, team leadership, and Agile adoption. Diana is co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects; Quickstart Guide to Five Rules for Accelerated Learning; and originator of the breakthrough “Path through Agile Fluency” model.

KEYNOTE TITLE: Best Job EverABSTRACT: Think back over your work and life. What was your “best job ever”? What qualities stand out to you as you relive it? And what do you think made that possible? More and more, software developers come to know Agile as a set of practices that deliver an experience you might call “at least my work doesn’t suck so much anymore” - and then don’t know to expect anything more. We can do better than that! In this talk Diana Larsen calls on you to remember the everyday felt experiences of many early Agile teams that learned to love their work again.

Early teams and practitioners focused on Agile as an opportunity to make things better for themselves, their customers, and their business partners - not as a panacea for their problems. They talked about “trust”, “self-organization”, “excellence”, and building teams around “motivated individuals”. This was a starting point, not a fairy-tale ending they were working towards.

Diana reminds us how to reclaim our goal of reaching for and achieving our “best jobs ever”, by protecting those practices and attitudes that create them wherever we experienced them in life, in or out of Agile. How do you make your current team experience the benchmark for all future work? No matter who you are, or where you work - there’s room for more love for work on your team - let’s discover it together.

BJARTE BOGSNES

Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is currently heading up the Beyond Budgeting implementation at Statoil, Scandinavia's largest company with operations in 36 countries and a turnover of 130 bn USD. On Fortune 500, the company was recently ranked #1 on Social responsibility and #7 on Innovation. Transparency International has named Statoil the most transparent listed company globally.

Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Round Table Europe (BBRT), and is a popular international business speaker and winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. He is the author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the Performance Potential", where he writes about his implementation experiences. Statoil realized that traditional leadership and management practices no longer work in today's competence organizations operating in business environments more complex, dynamic and unpredictable than ever. The company implemented innovative alternatives to traditional management, like abolishing traditional budgets and calendar-based management in favor of more decentralized, Agile and human processes.

KEYNOTE TITLE: Beyond Budgeting - an Agile management model for new business and people realities - the Statoil implementation journeyABSTRACT: